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NEVADA SITE URGED FOR NUCLEAR DUMP

After spending 14 years and $4.5 billion on studies, the Energy Department said today that it would recommend that Yucca Mountain, a barren volcanic structure about 90 miles from Las Vegas, be used to bury thousands of tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from power plants and nuclear weapons factories.

The department has been trying for decades to find a place to dispose of the waste piling up at its bomb factories and civilian power plants, and today's decision is only one step in a tortuous process with an outcome that is still uncertain.

But it is the first time that the department has said publicly that it can make a scientific case that the waste can be secured at Yucca Mountain.

The project faces substantial technical, legal and political challenges, and could be derailed by either house of Congress, the courts or engineering problems.

Since Congress chose the site in 1987 as a prime candidate for the burial of wastes, Nevada officials and environmental groups have questioned the ability of engineers to reliably predict that it will not leak significantly for 10,000 years, as government rules require.

The energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, added a twist to the debate today, saying, ''We should consolidate the nuclear wastes to enhance protection against terrorist attacks by moving them to one underground location that is far from population centers.''

The project is expected to cost more than $40 billion.

If President Bush approves, and no other problems block preparation, the earliest that waste could be stored in the mountain is 2010, officials said. But the suitability of the site is still far from clear to some scientists, and it faces the intense opposition of the Nevada Congressional delegation, including Senator Harry Reid, the deputy majority leader.

A simple majority in either house could block the project, although Mr. Reid and John Ensign, the Republican senator from Nevada, said that would be difficult.

Mr. Reid called the recommendation ''audacious,'' saying scientific work is not complete. He pointed out that the General Accounting Office last month said there were 293 issues still to be studied before the Energy Department would be ready to apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to open a repository. ''They should just cool it till they're ready,'' Mr. Reid said.

But Mr. Abraham said today that he believed that ''the science behind this project is sound and that the site is technically suitable for this purpose.''

But the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, said a recommendation now would be ''unfortunate and premature.'' Mr. Ensign, who has also vowed to fight the project, said that the Energy Department seemed ''hell-bent on making Yucca Mountain the repository,'' no matter what scientific studies showed.

Putting the waste in Nevada has one advantage for the 49 other states: it means the hot potato went somewhere else. And there is pressure from some state governments to solve the problem, as 103 operating power reactors around the country are running out of storage space or spending money to extend their storage capacity. While the nuclear industry is not near building new reactors, many plant owners are seeking 20-year extensions on their 40-year operating permits.

John H. Sununu, the former White House chief of staff and former governor of New Hampshire (which was once considered for a burial site) and Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former congresswoman from New York, said in a joint statement that Secretary Abraham's decision was ''a decisive step forward towards meeting our generation's responsibility for the stewardship of used nuclear fuel and defense waste.'' Mr. Sununu and Ms. Ferraro are members of a committee assembled by the United States Chamber of Commerce to push for the opening of the Yucca site.

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Mr. Abraham's announcement took the form of a 30-day advance notice to the governor of Nevada, as required under the nuclear waste law, that the department will recommend the site to the president.

Disposal of nuclear waste has been a festering problem for the civilian power industry for years, but has drawn more attention since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most of the spent fuel is stored in giant steel-lined pools, which were intended to hold only a few years of their reactor's output, but now have decades of fuel. They are built to withstand earthquake, tornado and other threats, but if they were drained in a terrorist attack, experts say that they could burn and spread vast amounts of radiation.

But in the decades-long argument over what to do with nuclear waste, even the terrorist argument cuts both ways, depending on who is providing the analysis. Some opponents of nuclear power say that the waste is not safe where it is, at power plants around the country, but would be even more at risk on trucks and trains en route to Nevada.

The mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar B. Goodman, said he would oppose the use of Yucca by rallying the mayors of cities along the transportation routes. He said that there were 109 cities with populations of at least 100,000 on those routes, and 52 million people living within half a mile of the routes.

The federal effort to find a place to put wastes began in the 1960's. In 1982, Congress promised to have a repository open by January 1998, and the Energy Department signed contracts with the reactor owners to take their wastes, beginning at that time, in exchange for a payment of a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour generated by nuclear power plants.

Since then the government has collected about $17 billion, but it will be 2010 at least before Yucca could open, even if it remains the chosen site. The utilities are suing for breach of contract, often backed up by their state regulators, who say ratepayers have paid for disposal but received nothing in return.

Some opponents say that by driving hard at Yucca Mountain, the department may have taken a years-long detour down a blind alley.

At the Institute for Environment and Energy Research, Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear scientist who specializes in studying the Energy Department, said that he favored a repository, but that the chemical conditions at Yucca Mountain were certain to cause corrosion in the containers and the spread of radioactive materials. Scientists agree that the most likely way that the materials would spread is by leaking into the water that flows down inside the mountain and then moves underground beneath the desert.

In fact, the Energy Department, as it has learned more about the characteristics of the rock, has placed more reliance on the packaging it plans to develop for the waste, and less on the rock itself. This has led opponents to assert that the project is no longer, as the law requires, a ''geologic repository,'' but a man-made one.

Another problem is that the department recently belatedly concluded that a law firm, Winston & Strawn, that has done much of the groundwork for preparing an application to license the Yucca site had a conflict of interest, because it was also a lobbyist for the nuclear industry at the time.

If the choice survives the Congress, the Energy Department will have to submit an application for a license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must hold hearings and decide whether Yucca can contain the wastes for 10,000 years, under rules written last year by the Environmental Protection Agency.